Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to withstand the pressure of the unknowable.

Never take a path that has no heart in it. You can't lose if your heart is in your work, but you can't win if your heart is not in it.

Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.

To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.

Seeing energy as it flows is an imperious need on the path of knowledge. Ultimately, all the effort of sorcerers is guided to that end. It is not enough for a warrior to know that the universe is energy; he has to verify it for himself.

One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped it... Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you're too real. Your endeavors are too real, your moods are too real. Don't take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself.

I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.